Thursday, June 10, 2010

I have officially moved my blog to WordPress. Please visit MichaelTHanley.com where Tax Saving Tips, Marketing Tips, and General Business Advice are posted at least once a day to pickup where my Blogger blog left off:

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Many of you are aware of the new Consumer Protection Laws in place for credit cards. If you haven't already noticed, take a look at your latest credit card statements...you will notice a simpler layout, more detailed information about payoffs, etc. You also should have received updated Terms from your credit card issuer outlining some of the new benefits such as limits on penalties and limits on interest rate changes.

However, small business owners need to be aware that these changes have not been incorporated into the realm of small business credit cards. Unless the credit card issuers are voluntarily putting these limits in place, your business credit card is subject to the same terms (aka no protection under the new Consumer Protection Laws) that it has always been subject to.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Over the past few years, one of the hottest topics on Long Island has been school district budgets. Between increased property taxes, budgets being voted down, and teachers being cut left-and-right, no wonder why there is so much controversy.

However, I'm not sure if anyone has taken a true step back to analyze the root problem here:

Too many teachers are being hired.

Now, before I go any further, I want to preface this post by stating that I am 100% pro-teacher. My wife is a teacher, my parents are both retired teachers, my sister-in-law is a teacher, my aunt is a teacher, many of my friends are teachers, and many of my clients are teachers. I know how hard-working teachers are and I wish there were more teaching positions out there so that there wouldn't be so many amazing teachers who find themselves unemployed or underemployed.

That being said, the root economic problem that these school districts are creating is that they are hiring too many teachers to begin with.

When you are able to cut 6, 8, 10, 18 teaching positions from a district (which usually amounts to .5 - 2 positions per school when you really analyze the numbers) and still operate business-as-usual without any noticeable changes, the question remains, "why did we need these extra 6, 8, 10, 18 teachers in the first place?"

Obviously, the answer is, "the taxpayers were willing to give us a bigger budget to play with, so we spent every penny and then hired additional teachers with the surplus funds." A more prudent solution would have been to only hire those teachers that were needed and to place those surplus funds into a reserve account that could be used in future years when the budget is tight.

Obviously, the districts like having as much manpower at their disposal as possible. However, when you hire 10 teachers in year one and then cut 8 of those teachers in year two, you just damaged the lives of 8 teachers. Had you not hired them in the first place, they would have been motivated to send out resumes and potentially gotten hired by a district that needed them and that planned to offer them a long-term position. Instead, they spent the year happily employed and felt secure in their new position, only to have the rug pulled out from under them just 10 short months later. I would estimate that 2-3 out of those 8 teachers also bought their first house during their first year of employment, locking themselves into a 30-year mortgage with $3k-$4k monthly mortgage payments only to now find themselves at the end of the school year with no job and no foreseeable way of making those monthly mortgage payments.

Teachers don't want to lose their jobs.Taxpayers don't want to be responsible for teachers losing their jobs.Taxpayers don't want to pay unnecessary taxes.

School districts need to stop this revolving door policy of 1-year and 2-year teaching careers, stop cutting 6, 8, 10, 18 teaching positions during tight-budget years, and start running their districts more like a business.

Solution - In years when money is flowing freely, hire only those teachers that you need and put any excess funds into a reserve account. In years when money is tight, use those reserve funds to save the jobs of the teachers that you need.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

To hide Farmville updates and other facebook game updates from appearing in your news feed, follow these simple steps:

1) Open your News Feed and look at the upper right corner of the update that you want to get rid of and you will see a button that says "Hide."

2) Click the Hide button and two more buttons will appear that will give you the option to either hide all updates from that particular friend or all updates from that particular application

In addition to helping you block these game updates, this also helps to hide updates from your friends who constantly post annoying status updates (like the updates that contain the word "muah," updates about The Bachelor, or some type of countdown to some special event coming up in their life).

Everyone can now enjoy their Mother's Day and stop hating their friends who play Farmville!

Now, if we can just figure out how to block people from posting gifts to your wall....

Friday, April 30, 2010

You can learn a lot about someone from checking out what Apps they have on their iPhone Home Screen...

To the left, you can see what my current iPhone Home Screen looks like. Across the top row...the Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn Apps are pretty self-explanatory...the Dragon Dictation App is the best speech-to-text or voice-to-text App available for the iPhone. In row two, Echofon is my favorite of all the Twitter account managers, WordPress to manage my blog, and Logmein to access my computer remotely. In row three, I deviate a bit from the business world with the IMDb App. I think this is the best App available for the iPhone and I like the IMDb App better than I like the actual IMDb website.

If you want to take a screenshot of your iPhone Home Screen to share it with your friends and colleagues, browse to your iPhone's Home Screen and press the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button at the same time. The screen will flash and the camera click will play. You can then view the screenshot in your Camera Roll.

So, this entire industry exists that revolves around people, companies, and automated bots sending out spam every minute of every day. Common sense says that an industry will only exist if there is money to be made.

My question is...who are these consumers who are shopping by clicking on links within spam e-mails, spam tweets, etc??

Next time someone tries to sell you Viagra, Cialis, $99 vacations to Disney, a $199 iPad, or a KFC Double Down through a text message, a tweet, or an e-mail, please ignore it so that we can try to put an end to this spam industry.

About Me

I am a CPA and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor who helps small business owners and self-employed individuals minimize audit risk while reducing tax liability.
My book, Effective Tax Planning for the MicroBusiness is available at: 30minutebooks.com